We had a lovely holiday season this year. Lots of good food, & family. We were both a little spoiled this year, & we finished it off by setting the Christmas tree on fire. {Outside, of course. I have no photos, sadly. I was too cold.}

Hex Bugs

Hex Bugs. I really shouldn’t be allowed near the toy aisles during the holidays.

Sour Cherry Shortbread

Sour cherry shortbread: maybe my new standby, paired with my now-famous chocolate star cookies. In this case if you want the recipe you have to buy the Macrina cookbook. I love that book. I love it so much.

We got to walk in the snow, play Shanghai Rummy, & Santa gave me a copy of Katamari Forever, which means that I bogarted the television & PS3 a little more than I otherwise would during the holidays. It’s my favorite game. {*Future note 01/10/11: Our PS3 broke Sunday night, with the Katamari Forever Disk in it. My heart is broken.}

For year three, I’ve started thinking about who I’m writing for. {Better late than never.} I started this blog to post my recipes & thoughts on fashion & trends through mediums like Etsy, Flickr, & the growing community of fashion bloggers who I admired & wanted to be a part of. I also started making jewelry about two years ago, & wanted an online presence to help me meet other creative minds & to possibly help me launch a business – however small -selling my jewelry to people who liked it.

I got distracted, & let the blog slide, & lost a little bit of the voice I started with when I went back to a sales-focused day job. I stopped making jewelry, & I stopped baking. I lost track of who I was writing for, & so I stopped posting here, too. I’d like post here with those same inspirations, & focus on my jewelry work: creating a space, getting into a creative rhythm & finding a balance. I want this to be a maker’s space, not a consumer space. I want a little less commercial space. I think that this time of year, we all do.

My life has been all consumerism all the time for the last six+ months before I fell down some stairs, & it took more of a toll than I was expecting when I got myself into it. Women’s sales exposes you to so many different types of people in a day, & I needed to find common ground with all of them. This is harder than it sounds, & I know half of your eyes glazed over when you read that. When it comes down to it, we are a disconnected world of that doesn’t always talk about what matters, talks too much about what doesn’t, & mostly waits for everyone to finish talking so we can get to what we want to say. Waiting to talk, not listening.

Finding common ground among us shouldn’t be so hard, but it is, & it’s stressful when I also need to sell you something. In a retail space, I find myself building friendships & finding common ground with women in a social contract that lasts sometimes half an hour, & never more than two, but rarely survives the day, & it’s exhausting.

I originally wrote an exhaustive post draft before this about what I went through in the last year, creatively and otherwise, but what it comes down to is that I’m not who I want to be today.

You know that they say the first step is admitting you have a problem.

The second step should add that you should never admit it on the internet…if this were more serious, I think I’d just go fix it quietly and sneak back here as if nothing happened. But it feels disingenuous to just say that I’m Back! Creative! & Better than Ever! – right?

To illustrate how far gone I am, most recent culinary achievement was finding a good teriyaki place down the street. {I confess, I confess! This isn’t even my achievement. Shawn found it for me.}

After six months, I was still struggling to find a work/life balance between my 40-45 hour/week job & my marriage, building a home {in a rented apartment} & living a creative life the way I had planned when I began this blog. By struggling I mean focusing on trends and fashion by obsessing over the internet in my free time & zoning out with T.V. when I was too brain-dead from work. I’d fill my time with Pintrest just to feel like I was accomplishing something.

I was functional. Dark chocolate gives me headaches now – ask me how! – and I was dissociating most of the time to avoid facing how frustrated I was becoming.

I don’t know exactly what my next year will be like, except that as I’ve said before, it’s going to have to be better. I’m shocked that the house isn’t a disaster – I’ve actually been keeping up with the kitchen, something that was amazing enough before you consider that I’ve been doing it on one leg – I’m managing support systems throughout the house to get around, because the last time I tried to get something while on crutches I fell & gave myself a black eye. I still can’t put weight on my foot, which is also still in a cast-like structure. I’ve been told that I won’t be able to be on my feet the way I was for maybe two years, which is sobering.

I am looking forward to sharing my next year with better people who love & appreciate me, & finding my voice, then building my jewelry line bit by bit.

I have a Tumblr site! While I’m clarifying the primary Motopresse, I thought a site for my photo/style inspirations would be a nice change. Also: Pintrest has been getting everyone’s time lately, {Seriously, everyone & their mom, everywhere.} because it’s pretty incredible, and incredibly addictive. The problem is that I’m spending all this time on a site that’s monetized for someone else, and not able to share the things I’ve been finding with anyone unless I also get the people I want to see my pins addicted to the same site. But! The Tumblr site lets me curate my own board from day to day, and it’s accessible to all. Don’t get me wrong, Pintrest is great, the way that Pocket frogs is great…in moderation.

You can find me here. I feel good about where I’ll be next year, especially since this won’t/can’t (?) be a building-poisoning, pneumonia & broken bones year.

So. It’s been an odd year, and my time on this site has clearly suffered. Apparently the powers that be really missed my blog posts, because I find myself laid up with a broken foot, a pile of books & my computer.

I was a miserable wreck trying to get up/down our stairs – we’re on the top floor, no elevator – & the most basic things are almost impossible when you can’t put any weight on your right foot. I spent the first few days feeling sorry for myself, watching old TV shows on Netflix, eating pity doughnuts from Top Pot & realizing how thankful I should be that it wasn’t my head that cracked at the bottom of the stairs. Or one of my hands, keeping me from making jewelry. I’m still alive, which after missing four stairs and landing on a concrete floor is definitely something to be thankful for.

Blogging is like exercise. The more you do it, the easier it becomes, but if you spend a month on your couch eating Cheetos, excercise gets a little more exhausting. I haven’t been sitting around eating cheesy snacks, but I have been up to everything but blogging. No writing, no sitting & sifting through Tumblr and Pintrest. I’ve been working, which is rewarding but exhausting, & running around town, cleaning the house, selling a large part of my former wardrobe…and maybe playing Pocket Frogs. Maybe. Don’t tell.

I actually didn’t intend to take a two month break from my space here. My studio’s in need of a little love too, as long as I’m being honest.

August is here & I’m feeling much better. {I’m the only person I know who can catch pneumonia in July. July fourth.} I’m adding work to my shop, doing some serious cleaning, & putting my wardrobe through another overhaul. Anyone interested in buying a pair of worn-twice 9.5 limited edition Fluevog boots that I love, but are too small – send me a message, or they are going on eBay!

I’ve gone and invested in two new pairs of shoes:

Best. Boots. Ever.

These won because the heel is the perfect height, the arches fit like a glove, and on my 35″ inseam, they go up to my knee on their lowest setting. I. Love. Them.

The perfect Oxford.

Truth Selby’s. I could walk all day in these, and probably will. Love. I need more Alexander Wang and Black Crane in my wardrobe to go with them…

So, everything that doesn’t go with these shoes are being hung in the potential-elimination section of my closet. We’ll see how that ends up going. {Luckily, it looks like I have a good foundation of pieces that already go with them.}

I found this via Mighty Girl…anyone who’s met me, or possibly has read this blog for long enough knows that I’m prone to unnecessary rants about small injustices, like the guy who walked into our store today with a lit cigarette, or the other guy who came in with a ferret. I have a daily battle against the patrons of the ice cream shop across the street, who haven’t heard of the extension of the “you break it you bought it” rule to include ice cream & cashmere. It’s reassuring to listen to someone else rant about small offenses the way I do.

If you’ve worked in an office, the last minute and a half or so of the video is for you. Of course, most of the people telling those stories don’t realize that they’re only funny if you work in accounts/insurance/the office.